


It's A Long Way Back

by sadfrogbucky



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Blink and you'll miss minor characters, Brock Rumlow and Alexander Pierce aren't dead after all!, F/M, Flashbacks, Internalized Homophobia, Lots of Angst, M/M, Natasha Romanov Is a Good Bro, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Sam Wilson Is a Good Bro, Slow Burn, a lot of shit happens, bucky "can't catch me gay thoughts" barnes, but it'll be okay probably, shameful use of google translate, suggestive content in later chapters, what a surprise
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-10
Updated: 2016-07-19
Packaged: 2018-07-22 16:21:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7445800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sadfrogbucky/pseuds/sadfrogbucky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After leading a grueling life as the world’s most gifted assassin, James Buchanan Barnes has found himself a life that he finds both comforting and unbearable. While trying to make the best of this new life that was handed to him, Tony Stark, head of what remains of the Avengers, desperately needs Bucky on his team to break through the tough cases involving scouting out unknown HYDRA members and bases, and enlists Steve Rogers to ensure Bucky’s mental well-being. As Bucky hunts down brutal killers, will he crack under the pressure or come out on top stronger and more volatile than he ever was?<br/>In Bucky and Steve's most vulnerable moments they also share their most intimate. It's as if Bucky met the not best person in the world, but the only absolute, the one person that enters his life and provokes an immediate pleasure and incredible relief. The connection that Bucky had with Steve before the war is something he can’t get rid of and follows him into the 21rst century. Steve Rogers was the one thing Bucky Barnes wanted despite everything else he knew.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Where We Are Now

**Author's Note:**

> But before I go,  
> I want you to know  
> That you’re the reason my heart beats.  
> And before you go  
> I would like to know  
> If your heart still beats at all.  
> And before we go  
> We should both know  
> How many beatings we can withstand.  
> Malika-writes, One-Night Love

There was a time in Bucky’s life when he wasn’t an assassin and the love of his life used to make fresh lemonade. He would sing Bucky a sweet little song while lemon flesh rained into a pitcher with faded and scratched up butterflies and flowers that he had painted on. Bucky would sit at the table with his half-eaten ham and cheese sandwich and watch Steve while he was lost in his own world.

Light would cast over the square tiles on the floor and the knife would make an effervescent _chop chop chop_ while Steve sliced the citrus in half, then thin lateral incisions into their lemon bodies.

There was a painting of a blue jay next to the clock. Fresh picked daisies were always on the windowsill in a crystal vase that would cast star clusters on the wall when the light hit the window just right.

Things were quiet, transparent. Simple. There wasn’t metal in place of where his arm should be. He didn’t have blood staining his hands. Steve Rogers, his best pal since twelve, would stand in front of the mirror, puff out his chest and get on his toes to make himself appear as big as Bucky did.

Steve had these real pink cheeks that made it look like roses sprout from them.

“When life gives you lemons?” Steve would ask.

You don’t make lemonade. You slice your finger open and scream at the pain.

* * *

Leaving the United States with charges for murder and treason, and without a passport should be an impossible task. But for a man whose mind worked in a constant momentum of contingency, it was scarcely a problem.

A good fifteen hours had passed since the mission had failed. Modern technology allowed the Soldier to read through most, if not all the news that was readily available. He moved around the subject as if uninterested in it but it wasn’t until he was halfway across the Atlantic Ocean when he posed a question that addressed his situation directly.

_What happened?_

He regarded himself in the way a handler or Alexander Pierce would, or at least tried to. The Soldier’s eyes  were cast ahead on an old German movie that was playing, but his attention was elsewhere; miles away on the river bank of the Potomac that grew more distant by the minute. In his hand he still nursed a glass of carbonated water, the fourth glass, untouched and exposed to the point of losing its fizz. The drink was revolting. Why he kept grabbing a glass each time the flight attendant passed, he wasn’t sure. Why he continued to take sip after sip, he didn’t know either, but he was certain this would be his last.

 _I blinked,_ he  thought after an overdrawn pause. He settled more comfortably in his chair and finally set down his glass on the tray in front of him. _Distracting.  Eyes are such a distraction._ He flashed half a smile with a lazy side glance out the window but he didn’t turn his head. The gears in his mind keep twisting and grinding against each other, conflicting and dissonant. He knew what was going on, but he tried his best not to think about it.

_You never look into your target’s eyes…_

The Soldier’s jaw clenched in anger. He should have known better. But what happened, happened and there is nothing he can do about that anymore.

Unfortunately for him, he didn’t lack insight on what had happened. In fact, he’d say he knew too much to stop thinking about it. Natasha’s name had been mentioned among the mess of SHIELD (or what was left of it) and HYDRA, and that didn’t surprise him. The surprise came from his own own personal failing for not assuming such a thing possible. He never thought that an intelligence agency with so much to lose would kill itself in the same way a host dies to kill off a virus.

However, more importantly was Natasha. For years now he thought she was dead, he thought he killed her. But he should have anticipated her resilience and ability to create a new life for herself on her feet. Besides, it made sense: SHIELD’s obsession with HYDRA and himself ran deep, and such a coaxing ace was a logical thing to keep up one’s sleeve. Especially a woman like Natasha who always made sure she was ten steps ahead of everyone else.

But yet here he was, on a flight of supposed victory with freedom intact, but the displeasure around him was so palpable and thick it could be cut with a knife. There was a huge misstep in this grand scheme of his and Pierce’s, that much he admitted to himself a moment ago. The festering wound of fear and loss was evident, but something else, something stronger bubbled under the surface.

The world didn't make any sense.

 

He used to have thoughts so perceptive, so lucid, and so aware of others; he was slow and calculated, and trained to be the monster that is feared in the dark… he is (was?) a mass murderer; the world’s deadliest assassin. But at this moment, his mind felt fragmented like broken shards of painted glass. He thought that Alexander Pierce had finally broken him, shattered him like glass hitting the floor. But he had nothing to do with it. It was that man, that man on the bridge, the helicarrier, and finally on the river bank, who had broken him.

There was a sharp pain in his chest whenever he thought of him, a physical pain that started where his heart was and spread up his throat and made him struggle for breath.  He wanted to go back to the river bank. He wanted to go back and kill that man because he was the one derail everything.

_Bucky._

_James Buchanan Barnes._

He told him that they were at once friends, and the Soldier didn’t know…

He had spent an hour under a dead husk of a bush by the river side with his hands clamped over his ears and his knees to his chest, trying to get the screaming to stop. It was like someone who had been trapped inside of him this whole time had a light shone on him.  A being that had since been silenced in the dark, and finally let himself be heard in the most devastating way.

Later into the night, he stole some clothes --  a baseball cap, some pants, and a sweatshirt -- quickly changing out of his old clothes and into the fresh ones. The old ones he threw away. The next morning he boarded a plane to Munich, but halfway over the Atlantic Ocean, he felt as though someone had driven a stake through his head and was prying his skull apart.

“We are the creators of our own disappointments,” was all he muttered to himself. Alexander Pierce had said it whenever he had done something wrong. The subtle shift of his face, the thinning of his lips and the clench of his entwined fingers were enough to give him away.

Longing.  Hurt. Guilt.

* * *

 

Steve was released from the hospital with his discharge instructions, a long-term plan with a therapist, and a script for antidepressants and antibiotics. He walked himself down to the discharge area, where they made him sign all his discharge paperwork. They handed him his wallet and a pack of gum in a plastic bag marked “patient belongings”.

Steve stood just outside the hospital doors and watched the people around him going about their daily lives; going to work, going to school, walking around with the dogs. He watched as a vendor sold hot dogs out of his hot food cart, smiling at his customers as he handed them back their change. He watched people buying newspapers, balloons and teddy bears for their sick loved ones. He noticed that the headline on one of the newspapers had finally changed their tacky headlines about SHIELD, the rise of HYDRA, and the supposed return of the deadly assassin. Instead, they were now about the heroics of the firefighters who had rescued a family of cats from a burning house. 

It was in that moment that he realized that the world kept moving forward.  It was only him that had stopped.

On the walk back to his apartment, a limo pulled up alongside him. Steve noticed the Stark license plate and sighed, kicking a rock off the sidewalk and into the street.

The far back door opened in invitation.

“Get in, Steve.”

“Hello, Tony,” Steve said as he got into his seat. He didn’t bother to put his seat belt on as the car took off.

“How nice of you to join us, Steve,” Tony said, polite as ever.

Steve regarded Tony for a minute before kicking whatever was under the seat in front of him. It made a sort of clinking noise, like metal. “Sorry,” he said. “My leg slipped.”

Tony raised an eyebrow. “I’m sure Bucky would not have appreciated it if you did what you were thinking of doing.”

_Bucky isn’t  here anymore._

But, of course, Tony knew that. If he hadn’t know that, all of it might not not have really happened.Tony didn’t have to ask how Steve was doing. He’d probably read everything about how Steve was faring in the news, seen it in how long it took for Steve to sit down. He’d probably seen it in the parting of his hair or the slight tremble in his hand at rest.

“It gets better, Steve,” Tony said. “Right now it may seem like the suffering is interminable, but I promise you one day you will look back at all of this and be very, very happy that you didn’t do what you almost did.”

Steve sighed. “Great. Now you’ve made me embarrassed for you.”

“Why?”

“I would not have expected you, of all people, to give me a tired old platitude.”

“Truths are rarely witty.”

“Cliché,” Steve acknowledged. “Truths are very old and tiring.”

They drove around Washington D.C and Alexandria for a bit in silence. Steve was grateful for it, he wasn’t in the chatting mood anyway.  They passed the apartments, the White House, Washington Monument. There was a sign for one of the Smithsonian museums: closed for renovations.

Steve wondered what that had to be like to be Tony, to have the power to bend people to his whims with his wealth, to start wars in foreign countries, to be a genius. But unable to get into the Air and Space Museum.

Tony looked at Steve like he wanted to tell him something important. Steve wasn’t sure if he wanted Tony to say anything at all.

“Why don’t you get out?" Tony suggested, "Find someone? A girl, maybe?”

That caught Steve off guard, so he laughed. “I hope you’re seriously not considering that I go out and meet someone,” Steve said blithely, “only so you’ll have that satisfaction of being able to set me up.”

“I am only suggesting that some female companionship would be nice,” Tony countered.

“Right.” Steve nodded. “Right. We skipped right past the stage when Steve gets over the fact the man whom he thought was dead, come back as a man that is kept up on strings like a puppet, when he is still clearly upset about this whole thing,” he snapped, turning toward Tony. “ A few days ago I dropped my shield in front of an assassin and I had a prescription for Sertraline in my medicine cabinet at home. But it was good seeing you.Talking to you has just done amazing things for my self-esteem.” He tapped on the window between the back seat and the front. “You can just let me out here.”

The driver, predictably, didn’t stop. Steve sighed, leaning back into the seat and crossed his arms. He turned to face the window and looked out to the grey sky.

“Come now, Stevia,” Tony tsk’d. “Are you still seeing that incompetent therapist of yours? What's-his-name? You must be. You have always been loyal to a fault. He should have suggested you move on a while ago; by now you should know that the company with others or even a pet, can fullfill the basic human need for touch and support. It increases production of serotonin and dopamine -- essential for the depressed." “Who says I’m depressed?” Steve quipped dryly. “And besides, I have you guys to fulfill my human need for touch.”

"Who says I'm depressed?" Steve quipped dryly.

“Of course,” said Tony, “Normally functioning people don't make a habit out of signing their death wishes.”

“As a matter of fact, yes they do,” said Steve. “You ought to try it sometime. I find it very soothing.”

Steve looked up at Tony and caught something, a flicker of an expression - something wistful. The word came to him with painful precision. He had recognized it before when he was in a hospital bed with his mother standing over him, and Bucky was off sitting in the chair across the room, just looking at him with the same face now that Tony was giving him.

Steve hated pity; that cloying, soft look of “are you alright” that left a taste in his mouth like milk starting to go sour. That gentle tone that had manifested in his friends, in their voices and their hands on his back, the unspoken poor Steve, poor Steve. Oh, poor, kid. He had been treated that way since he was a child and it followed him throughout his life like a shadow. He hated Tony, then, suddenly and with passion, for what he saw was worse than pity. 

Sympathy. Understanding.

“Why a girl?” Steve asked suddenly.

“Trust me,” said Tony, with the omniscience that allowed him to tune into not only people’s secret lives but also their perfect matches. “You want a woman.”

Steve sighed, and hated Tony for his good intentions.

“How are you doing, Steve?” Tony asked suddenly. “I mean, really.” Steve gave Tony a look of pure Roger curiosity, as if Tony were a marvel of classical art. He suspected that this was a question that Tony Stark rarely asked, if at all.

“I’m...dealing, as they say,” said Steve. “With the aftermath.”

“Yes,” said Tony. It was as good an answer as any. “Aren’t we all.”

Outside his window, the  sky had become grey and overcast, heavy with smog and sodden clouds. The sun was gone behind the grey overcast.

“It was good to see you, Steve,” Tony said, which surprised him. “Perhaps we should meet for coffee sometime.”

Steve said, “Yes, let’s. That sounds nice.”

The car stopped in front of the apartment complex. By the time Steve stepped out, it had already begun to rain.

* * *

While the Winter Soldier was in Munich, he thought about Steve Rogers and not Captain America or his target for the first time in weeks. Maybe even longer. Definitely longer.

He’d been kept up in his motel room for about six months, too afraid to call Alexander Pierce or go outside into the city in fear that someone would recognize him. His heart scrambled and pounded against his chest every time he heard the most innocent of noises: footsteps by his door, the squeak of the maids cart, or even the sound of the river rushing by his window. During the day, he’d sit at the edge of his bed and listen to the German-language TV, shower, or just walk around the perimeter of his tiny, leaking room. During the nights, he sat by the window in a heavy coat he borrowed (a loose term for stole) and watched the cars and people pass by beneath on the road or sidewalk. He had fled Washington D.C in such a hurry and the simple sweatshirt and jeans combination he had were not going to keep him warm enough in the hard winter months in Germany.

The months that followed running away had been a solitary and surreal time. The leaves changed color and fell, it rained a good deal, and it got dark early. In some of the places he stayed, people would burn fires in garbage cans to keep warm, and wore heavy jackets and gloves with holes and stains. But the Soldier had kept to himself, in the park or the dark alleyways, looking for something to eat in dumpsters and keeping warm by stealing whatever jacket he thought would keep him warm the longest. Sometimes he would get lucky and find an open window, climb into someone’s home to take only what he needed: things that people wouldn’t notice were missing like a few dollars, some clothes or Euros, bypassing all the firelit scenes and hardly speaking, even to those that invited him in for shelter. He thought that he might be sick, though he didn’t think such a thing was ever possible because the serum was supposed to keep him in top shape. He was just tired and felt cold all the time and couldn’t sleep any longer than three hours a night, no matter how exhausted he was.

Outside, the world was cheerful and busy. It was Christmas time by the look of it; twinkling lights on trees at night, icy winds, the Coca-Cola commercials with the polar bears and happy families. The sleet tapped and scraped on his window, the still winter night carried with it the chilly tone of his youth, deprivation and asperity, weak coffee without sugar or cream, and starving to bed.

Every morning, before the sunrise, before the extra clerks were on duty and the lobby filled up, he walked downstairs to get the newspaper. The staff moved quickly and talked in hushed voices around him, eyes gliding across him as if they hadn’t _quite_ seen him but were so drawn to this curious person they had to examine him for themselves.  They would quickly avert their eyes the moment, he looked in their general direction, though, as if they were afraid of him. The staff only knew him as the man who claimed he was from Berlin, lived in room 37A, paid for his room in crumpled up dollars and loose change, and never talked to anyone or went outside. The Soldier tried to reassure himself that the manager would never go to a great length to make a fuss about it and try to talk to him.

In Munich, his predicament was still plastered all over every once in a while and today was one of those days. He gathered the newspaper with a picture of Captain America pushing his way through a crowd of people with cameras and microphones over the front cover, and went back into his room. He grabbed the other papers from the dresser and splayed them on the bed: photographs, police cars, crime scene tape, a list of all known SHIELD and HYDRA agents, a photograph of Natasha in a three-month-old edition.  Now, he had a picture of Captain America as well as a statement from him translated into German.

_Un im Moment , ich und vertrauenswürdige Freunde alles, was wir den Aufenthaltsort des Winter Soldier auf die Spur zu können , und bringen ihn._

_(At the moment, I and trusted friends are doing all that we can to track down the whereabouts of the Winter Soldier and bring him in.)_

Although Captain America didn’t give the name ‘Bucky Barnes’ or give a description of what he looked like, there was no way to know if the police in Munich knew what he looked like or if they were withholding information from the public. There was really no way to know how much they knew and what they didn’t. All of it depend on how much Captain America had found out about him in the months since being released from the hospital and how much he shared with the rest of the world.

Despite his fears,  he was an expert at making himself invisible.  He had gone as far as getting an old straight edge razor and hair clippers, slicing off pieces of his hair and enough of his beard so no one would recognize him from photos or descriptions they had on him if they were based on recent sightings. He shaved his hair close to his scalp and missed a few spots so it was uneven and messy, and nearly cut himself once or twice. If he felt brave enough, he would rouse himself to go to more heavily populated areas. He could linger two hours in civilian areas, nursing a cup of tea, four over a meal, and go hardly noticed by anybody.

It seemed that people ignored him, made as though to walk through him like a ghost. Sometimes he would walk around the park with his cloak of invisibility around his shoulders and sit at the bench for entire days, just watching. His presence would go unnoticed by the people walking by, the animals, and the police officers. He should have been used to being ignored by now; handlers and doctors treated him like a slab of meat, and yet, he was supposed to have found his freedom here. But his head only felt more and more like a prison each day. He became convinced that it was only a matter of time before Pierce or Brock would find him and kill him, get shot at, or worse: would freeze or starve to death in his cold cell before anyone would really care to help.

 _The Soldier is no longer of value to me,_ Pierce might say, _it is no longer functioning the way it should and therefore has a right to die and be replaced._

Maybe Captain America wasn’t lying when he said that he was looking for him. Maybe he might get lucky and the Captain would be standing across from him before anyone else did.

Each time he went outside, he made it a point to cross the footbridge over the Isra River, and he stopped to dig around the soot-colored snow at the road’s edge until he found a decent sized rock that was a little smaller than his palm. The Soldier would then look over the ice capped railing before stepping back and throwing the rock into the rapids that churned over the grey and speckled or swirled rocks that made up the river’s bed, an attempt to remind himself that he truly did exist, that he wasn’t a machine. He leaned up close over the edge, almost bending his chest over the railing, and watched the currents. The water ran so shallow and clear in places that sometimes after throwing the stone, he wouldn't hear a _thunk_ from the rock hitting the water, rather the  _click_ as it made contact with the rock bed. With both hands on the railing, he looked down at the water as it swirled and dashed against the boulders, and he wondered what it would be like to fall and break his head open on one of those pointy rocks;  a wicked crack like a whip, then marbling blood spilling into the glassy water.

 _If I threw myself off,_ he thought, _who would find me in all that vast emptiness?_ _Would the river carry me downstream over the rocks until it spat me out into quiter waters, where someone would find me? Or would I be lodged stubbornly in some anonymous place between some boulders and wait for spring before anyone ever noticed I was there? Would anyone even notice my absence? Would anyone even care? Would Steve Rogers be hurt by this?_

His life, or what was left of it, had up until this point only been solitary and miserable, and now was becoming unbearable. What was supposed to be his freedom and a new life had only become a horrible existence where he can’t seem to get out of his own head. Every day, in a sort of daze, he just spent days walking around Munich and then back to his room, sometimes during weather that was fifteen or twenty degrees  below, sometimes during storms so bad all he could see was white, and the only way he made it back to his room at all was by grabbing onto the guardrail on the side of the road. Once in his room, he wrapped his dirty blankets around himself and dropped like a dead man onto the floor.

All of his moments that had not already been consumed with instinctive habits of self-preservation were absorbed with what he thought were hallucinations. One time in what could have either been a hallucination or reality, he saw a corpse, hair stiff with ice and blood-shot eyes wide open, and a left arm that had been severed just below the elbow. Blood had burned through the snow at one point, but was now red slush. When the Soldier blinked, he was in another room with Alexander Pierce, strapped down to a table, and then he woke up in his motel room bathed in sweat and tears.

In these long nights, after a nightmare, an unfamiliar feeling grows in his chest and stomach, so strong that he feels he could vomit. He doesn’t recognize the pain as something that would have come from electrical storms or hospital rooms. He wipes at his eyes to clear away any tear there, and carefully ignores the way his hand is shaking, the way his metal one is still clenched as if he was in serious pain. He saw things, some of them connected with a pain that would make his heart stop. Sometimes they were fragmented with no beginning or end that flashed on him, and it made his head hurt more than it did months ago. Years ago. However long ago it have been since he arrived in Munich.

He knew what he had to do. He needed to know that man whose name rang in his head. And the man in the water, he needed to know about him too. In the morning, he walked to the library that wasn’t much of a walk to look them up. He knew how to use a computer alright, so it wasn’t hard to find what he was looking for. The first time he saw the man’s face again, the one that sent a wave of recognition through him, he stopped to look at it for a long while. Something horrible was clawing inside him, and he could hear the man’s voice.

Looking everything up all at once made him feel sick, looking at all the faces and objects and clothes and too much information to take in at once. Captain America was everywhere. And then he found himself. He could vaguely make out the similarities between himself and this boy staring back at him through the screen. He clicked the image of himself and it brought him to a new page where he read each line of text that popped.

The Soldier understands who Captain America thinks he is, wants him to be, but he doesn’t recognize the young, bright-eyed soldier with a nonthreatening smile on his face. The Soldier saw himself in this picture, but he couldn’t recognize himself and looked through himself, as if he was just another name. A stranger.

The Soldier had to revisit the moments before the fall a hundred times to understand it and get rid of the superfluous static, the sound of destruction, the rush of blood in his ears, the screaming of the damned that made the words hard to hear. The incidental clashes and howls of a fight and destruction rang on in his head. He went back and blocked out all the noise in his head and eventually found them both in a bubbleskin moment of silence.

Captain America had been stern, yet kind and hesitant except for when he couldn't have been. None of his actions inflicted any fatal harm, nor were there any attempts to do such thing. He was only trying to slow him down, make it harder for the Soldier to move around and complete the mission. Captain America's mission was never to kill him, only make him stop. He had said that his name was James Buchanan Barnes. He was his best friend. He wasn’t going to fight him.

He didn't know him, but he knew - _something._

The last of which is something that the Winter Soldier won't admit to, and he wants to laugh, bitterly.

This was wrong. He was a weapon. He doesn’t make his own choices, they show him a target and he shapes the world. He sleeps for months or years at a time and the cycle repeats itself. Put a gun in his hand and the beast inside of him stirs. He certainly doesn't _feel._

 _But I knew him._  

* * *

The Soldier didn’t know how long he had been asleep for. When he came to, everything around him suggested that he was lying flat on his stomach in a sandbox, on some dark playground - someplace he didn’t know, a deserted neighborhood. A gang of tough, ruty boys was bunched around him, kicking him in the ribs and the back of his head. His neck was twisted to the side and the air was knocked out of his body, but that wasn’t the worst of it; he had sand in his mouth, he was breathing sand.

The boys muttered, audibly: _Get up, asshole_

_He don’t know shit._

_Fuck him._

The Soldier rolled over and threw his arms over his head and then - with an airy, surreal jolt - saw that nobody was there.

For a moment he lay too stunned to move. Alarm bells were blaring in his head and his heart pounded in his chest as he looked up and saw darkness. The assassin was still in the motel, and not a sandbox. There was no sand in the room and every breath he took was clear of any sort of debris. But he ached all over, his ribs were sore and his head felt like someone had hit him with a lead pipe. He was sweating and his whole body was rigid. He rose, his heart pounding, and put on a dry T-shirt. He threw the wet one into the bath tub, and got back onto the dry side of the bed.

What happened was a dream, and he's sure of it, but it seemed all too real to be a dream. The sand he felt tearing up his throat was real, the throb in his jaw was real. He heard things that no one has ever spoken to him before. This wasn’t his imagination, it was something else. Everything was distant and blurry and the images he saw and the voices he heard bleed into one another like an oil painting.

The Soldier couldn’t take it anymore. He tried to turn his face away as a swimmer turns to breathe. He began to relax a little on the bed and poured himself a glass of water. He put it to his lips and started to take a drink, gasped, and choked it onto his chest. The Soldier fumbled for the bedside lamp, turned it on, and grabbed the box from the dresser drawer. He took out the newspapers and the notes from the library and spread them across the bed.

Here was everything he knew about James and Steve, and here was the information he got on the Winter Soldier and Captain America. Here was the statements given by SHIELD agents that were several years old. Here were the boys from the 1930’s, one dead and the other to grown up to be Captain America. The one named James Barnes had been his best friend since childhood and even served alongside him until he died after slipping from a train. His body was never recovered and it was assumed that after it had finished snowing, people had walked over him, packing the snow into ice on top of his body. This was who James Buchanan Barnes was, and the Soldier wasn’t him.

None of it made sense.

It didn’t match, everything was skewed and out of place like when you try to force a puzzle piece into a spot that doesn’t fit. What the Soldier saw and felt were too real and the thought of having an image like this in his head frightened him. Could this have been another hallucination? A false memory? The Soldier runs through the list in his head again and again trying to come up with an answer, but there had been none.

He was alone, and felt naked there in that room. There was nothing but the dim lights and shadows. And Captain - _Steve Rogers_ \- on the pictures in front of him.

The Soldier could not understand what he was seeing and what he felt.

He couldn’t see Steve, not as he was.

But he knew - _something._ The Soldier might have seen if not for the haze of brainwashing and electrical flames fogging his brain. He might have seen Steve for the boy he had once been, the one who didn’t die despite everything.  Who had grown into a man that looked normal.

 _What are you?_ The Soldier thought. _Are you real?_

It was in his nature to not feel anything, and he didn’t question it. He lacked morality to agonize over anything. Or rather, he used to. Almost anything could be trained to resist instinct. The Soldier didn’t want to go after Captain America anymore or kill him. But in the back of his mind, he can still hear the voice telling him to kill him and finish the job.  

The Soldier kept track of all incoming and outgoing intentions between himself and whomever the Captain was working with, and it appeared that Captain America was en route to capture him while he lied in wait to see what his first thought is upon his arrival. He was either going to kill him or go with him without resistance.

* * *

 

If this were the 1940’s, many people would find it unusual or even sinful to be drinking the night before Sunday, making rounds with the full intention of getting just enough past tipsy to curb the sharpness of the pain. But even now, what Steve was doing is just plain and simple irresponsibility. It’s a good thing that he’s a familiar face, Steve thinks to himself as he steps out of the cold and into the warm, friendly darkness of the pub. People tend to be more forgiving to him. He found a corner booth in the far back, the most sparsely populated area in the place, hopping no one would bother him back there. He settles with his head against the back cushion and with a long sigh.

Everything had been going smoothly. He was alone for a while and it allowed him to gather his thoughts. Eight months of searching for Bucky had brought up dead ends and useless tips, and Steve was starting to doubt if Bucky even wanted to be found. Maybe he was leaving these bread crumbs behind to throw them all off course so that he could run off without anyone tailing him. Steve’s head was too full of conspiracies. Too many versions of events that happened after he was dragged to the river bank. In his experience, that means it would be damn near impossible to find Bucky. Either he didn’t want to be found, he was dead, or he wanted to be found but he made it difficult for Steve to get him.

“On the house,” the waitress says as she sets down a small glass that is halfway full of a amber brown liquid that looks and smells like expensive whiskey in front of him. He says his thanks, and sits in resigned silence, listening to the clicks of her heels as she leaves him to his own devices.

“Ah. There he is.” There was a short pause, for what Steve thought was to glance back over his shoulder. "I've found him, guys."

Steve could have recognized that voice from anywhere. It was just far too familiar for him. He made a small effortless smile but he didn't even look at the man. He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was a soft gesture but he couldn't quite fathom the idea that a man, a man other than Bucky could have such a gentle touch upon his body.

“Yeah?” Steve doesn't mean to sound upset, but he had been so frustrated lately it was hard not to keep the agitated tone out of his words. He looked up as Sam slid into the seat across from him.

“So why are you here?”

His smile was friendly in the same way it had always been, and he talked only to fill the silence between them. Maybe it was to get Steve talking after being silent for so long.

"Wanted a drink." Steve wasn't in the mood for pleasantries, and he thought that the annoyance in his voice would be enough to get Sam to leave him alone for ten minutes. He was asking for ten minutes to be alone and not have anyone worry about him. So yeah, he grabbed a drink at a bar and nursed it long enough to last those ten minutes.  

"Thought you couldn't-"

“For the love of Christ,” Steve bangs his fist on the wooden table and sends the unlit candle in the middle of the table clattering to the wood, “don’t do this to me today, Sam.” His outburst has grabbed the attention of every single scattered patron around them, and he feels his temples throbbing with pressure under their additional scrutiny. “Not tonight. Please, just...”

Sam looks like he’s just watched a bomb go off. In a way, Steve supposes, he has, and it doesn’t take too long under that look that he feels heat begin to prickle across his cheeks and behind his eyes. Unintentionally, he’s almost broken the table. It’s a rather unfortunate angle now from where his first hit, and rather than continue to look up at Sam after that somewhat embarrassing outpouring of emotion, he  looks down at the table, says, "What? What do you want?" Steve didn't want to talk about his feelings or anything at all that lingered around the same topic for longer than it should.

The taste of the whiskey is bitter when he takes another sip, too hot to go along with the existing heat that’s already made home in Steve’s throat.

"I'm sorry," Sam says quietly when he’s regained some level of control over his facial expression, carefully cracking through the silence built between them in a matter of a few tense minutes. “I shouldn’t have said what I did. I’ll shut up.” He swipes a finger over the ring of condensation on the wooden counter where Steve's drink had been. In the time it took Steve to say nothing, Sam had ordered himself a drink too, knowing that it would take a while for Steve to come around. “Now..." Sam started when he got tired of waiting for Steve to talk. "I’m gonna sit here until you’re ready to talk. You don’t have to say a word until you’re ready, but I’m not going anywhere until you do.”

Steve knew that he couldn't get drunk anymore. But it reminded him of the taste of Bucky's mouth, something he thinks about often enough without the additional encouragement. Still, the drink hurt his insides enough to feel a little good, even if it was for a moment, make him feel like he still had Bucky and perhaps everything would make sense again.

Steve’s fingers ghost over the area of skin that’s just behind his ear and he swears he can feel a bruise prickling up there, swears he can feel Bucky’s breath there too.

“I feel like I’m going mad, Sam,” he starts, closing his hand into a fist and setting it resolutely atop the table so that he’s not tempted to touch there again, “like nothing I could do could possibly make it seem like my entire world isn’t falling apart in front of me. I thought that we could’ve saved him, but I’m such an idiot, aren’t I? He doesn’t want to be saved. I thought…” _I thought he’d stay, that he’d stop_ , Steve finishes inside head, and it’s only when it’s out there, open in his conscious and to the world, that Steve realises he never knew anything at all. He’s never going to know where Bucky is, or even know him at all. He pauses, rolling the glass between his palms. “I need to save him.”

Steve’s friend stares at him for a moment, then takes another short sip of his drink and tongues over his front teeth as he sets it back down, and says, "I know," Sam said, his voice was soft and it provided some form of comfort to Steve, who still seemed to have steam blowing out of his ears. "That's what I came here for, actually."

Steve blinked, confused.

“What do you mean?" He fills in slowly, finally looking over at Sam who was pulling out a thin file that may have had three or four pieces of paper in it. Then he asks, "Is this about Bucky?" Sam nods, takes a sip of his drink and sets it back down.

"Take a look inside."

Steve pushes his unfinished drink to the side of the table and pulls the file closer, opening it, and flipping over what was inside. His hands were shaking.

Inside were police reports of money that had been stolen, shots of motel security footage, and a roster of people that had been staying in that motel. Steve's friend watches him as his face seemed to go from serious and set to a crumble in realization.

"That's..." Steve says slowly at barely a whisper, and his fingers move over the shot of a man with shoulder length hair and a baseball cap, looking up right at the camera with a thousand year stare on his face. "It's him."

* * *

Living back on the streets was an uneasy transition Bucky had to make. It hadn't been so bad to begin with; the snow wasn't as bad as the assassin remembered it had been in the past, and besides, he had found an empty warehouse to stay at during the night. But the temperature had quickly plummeted and it suddenly became the coldest winter he had ever been in. The Soldier was terrified of freezing to death, but there was no where else he could have gone. Sometimes in the night he would wake up because his body was shivering so violently and his jaw never stopped shaking. On the third night he woke from a bad dream (nightmare falling, the icy river, and a warm summer night) to hear a faint clicking noise. He sat up from the makeshift bed of a bunch of other clothes and a trap, to his horror, saw the doorknob turning in the moonlight. Too afraid to go back to sleep, the Soldier watched the handle move the rest of the night.

A terrible snow storm came later in the week, downing power lines, stranding cars and people, closing the airport, train station, and for him, another round of hallucinations. He didn’t see anything as much as he heard voices whisper to him in his sleep, hissing in the snow: _“Open your eyes”_ they said _“Open your eyes. You’ll be sorry if you don’t. I’ll staple your goddamn eyelids to your forehead if you don’t open them.”_

At night, as he lay shivering on the floor, he watched snowflakes illuminated by the moon flutter down in a column from a hole partly covered with black tarp in the ceiling. He was between the blurred lines between wakefulness and slipping into a dark unknown. His eyelids were too heavy. He would blink slowly, longer than he should and then something would tell him that if he kept his eyes shut he would never wake up again. He would snap his eyes open and watch as the snow, falling bright and tall in the corner, would appear to him as an airy angel of death. But the Soldier was too tired to react; even as he felt his grasp on reality slacking, and before long the Soldier had let go and slipped into that dark abyss. A rush of blood behind his eyelids and he had more nightmares.

_When you wake up, your only choice will be to run._

His grasp of time was skewed. Sometimes it was light, and other times it was dark, but he was sick and weak. So weak and tired. The only time he left the spot he was in, it was because he had no other choice.

He thought about… he thought about calling Alexander Pierce. He knew he wasn’t dead. Maybe he would come get him and the Soldier would get better. Maybe he would take pity on him, it’s happened before and this time would be the same. And maybe-

No. No, he can’t go back. He didn’t know what was going on, or who he was, or where he came from, but he knew he couldn’t go back there. But he was someone. Not just something. Not a weapon.

He existed.

The Soldier was heading back to the warehouse after his walk over the bridge, the snow was coming up to his mid calves, and before long his legs were prickling and numb. By the time the road came round and he was out of the park, the Soldier was seriously wondering if he could make it to the warehouse, and what he would do when he got there. And if not, maybe instead of the stone, he should throw himself off the bridge or just seek shelter behind a bush and hope for the best. Everything from here on out was dark and deserted,  the nearest light that came from a stop light seemed to be the only light blinking around the payphone underneath. He had about seventy-five cents in the coat pocket, more than enough to call a taxi. He didn’t have the money to pay for the ride but maybe the driver would let him go.

His voice slurred and the operator wouldn't give the number of a taxi company. "You have to give the name of a _specific_ taxi service." she said. "We're not allowed-"

"I don't know the name of a specific taxi service."  He rushed, and his voice was thick.

"I'm sorry, sir, but we're not -"

"Red Top?" He said desperately, trying to guess at names, make them up, anything. "Yellow Top? Town Taxi? Checker Board?"

Finally,  he guessed the right one, or maybe she felt sorry for him. There was a click, and a mechanical voice came on and gave him a number. The Soldier dialed quickly so he wouldn't forget, so quickly that he couldn't remember and lost his quarter.

He had one more quarter in the coat pocket; it was the last one. The Soldier took of his gloves with numbed fingers. Finally the quarter was found, and he had the coin in his hand and was about to bring it to the slot, when it suddenly slipped from his fingers and he reached forward after it,  losing his balance, slamming his forehead against the sharp corner of the metal tray beneath the phone.

The Soldier opens his eyes.

It’s night. A freezing, cloudless winter night, the only heat that had been there that day dissipated, curling slighting at the edges, winter nights were a savage beast. Its breath a harsh whispering wind flitting through the trees, lifts the leaves in their branches with abrasion, pushes through his hair and blinds him.

The Soldier lets his head fall back on the blanket of snow, winces at the dry crunch, the dull sting.

It’s night, and the ice-edged stars wheel overhead. A sudden, great well of grief swells over him, like being smothered in a blanket.

He laid on his side now, one eye only seeing white, the other a starry night.There was a crashing noise in his ears sort of like the sound waves make when capping on shore. In falling, he had grabbed for the phone as if it was a life line, and knocked it off the hook, and the busy signal the receiver made as it swung back and forth sounded as if it were coming from a long way off, and then closer again.

After a moment, he staggered to get up on all fours. His vision was a little blurry at first, but after a moment, his vision focused over dark spots in the snow where his head had been. When he touched his forehead with his ungloved hand and looked, his fingers were red. The quarter was gone; besides, he had forgotten the number. Somehow he struggled to his feet, leaving the black phone dangling from its cord with the crashing noise getting more distant by the second.

Bucky staggers through the rows of brittle trees, feet crunching on the carpet of snow like walking on broken glass. He’s shaking, head jerking on his neck like a live thing caught on a line, and his knees tremble once before they give out entirely.

He made it most of the way on his hands and knees. At the door he stopped to rest, his head falling against the brick wall, and felt his surroundings slide out of focus: static between radio stations, everything snowy for a moment or two before the black lines wavered and the picture snapped back; not quite clear, but recognizable. Jerky camera, summer nightmare.

_"You comin', punk? I ain't got all day?"_

A lightning flash.

_"Just one kiss, pretty boy. One before I go."_

In a sort of scramble, the Soldier got one foot on the ground and hoisted the rest of his limp body up to pushed the door open with his shoulder and began to fumble for a light switch when suddenly he saw something by his things that made him reel in shock. A figure in a long black heavy overcoat was crouching across the room by his things, and examining them.

The light came at a crackle and hum. The shadowy figure, now solid and visible, stood and turned on his heel. It was Captain - _Steve Rogers._ He looked like he was about to make a joke, but when he saw him, Steve’s eyes got wide and his smiling mouth fell open into a small o.

They stood, staring at each other across the room for a moment or two.

The silence seemed to go on forever.

"St - Steve Rogers?" The Soldier said at last, his voice scarcely more than a whisper.

Steve let the file he held a moment ago fall from his fingers and took a step toward him. It really was him - a little damp from the snow, rose red cheeks, snow on his hair and the shoulders of his jacket.

"Bucky." It wasn't a question this time. He reached out his hand to touch him, but he stopped and curled his fingers and thumb into his palm, like he was unsure if he should touch him or get near him for that matter.

The Soldier struggled to stand up straight where he was half bent over, unbalanced. Things had got too bright and the static filled his ears. He reached for the door frame, and the next thing he knew he was falling, and Steve had jumped forward just in time to catch him.

Steve eased Bucky onto the floor and took of his coat and spread it around him like a blanket. The Soldier squinted up at him and wiped the saliva, snot, and blood off his mouth. "Where did you come from?" he said.

"I came to find you, Buck." He was brushing the hair away from the Soldier’s forehead trying to get a look at his cut. There was a lot blood on his fingertips. “You. I’m here for you.”

"Some place I've got here, huh, Stevie?" he said, and laughed hysterical.

Steve glanced up at the hole in the ceiling. "Yes," he said briskly. "But not as good as our old place, huh?" Then he bent to look at his head again.

When Sam came in a minute later, he had called for an ambulance, leaving Steve to stay with Bucky, make sure that he was still awake. He adjusted himself so that he was sitting behind Bucky, positioning Bucky between his legs and with his back leaning up against his chest.

“Stay with me.” Steve whispered against Bucky’s ear

“Where else would I go?”

The wailing of the sirens reached his ears and the Soldier felt a surge of something akin to joy flood throughout his veins.  It startles him when he is suddenly lifted; the feeling is reminiscent of falling in a dream. He gasps and his arms fail to grab hold of something so he doesn’t fall into the abyss. Cold metal grazes his hand, but his hand slips when he tries to clutch at it. A hand presses against his head, holding him down and his arms are moved to his sides. He feels straps wrap across his body, securing him to a gurney. It’s strangely comforting to him and the soldier lets his body relax. It helps him ground him as his head swims with lightheadedness.

Inside the ambulance, the EMT's do what they can to stabilize the soldier. He can still hear Steve speaking to him, comforting him as he drifts in and out of consciousness. His pupils are checked and an oxygen mask is worked over his face.  

He reached for Steve, his grasp desperate and clinging. He clinged to Steve as if he was his last thread to life. It was fortunate that they’ve arrived at the hospital in time, roll him away down the hall.

Steve’s alone then, watching the doctors take him away, the thread stretching thinner and thinner.


	2. Something Against You

Steve can’t imagine Bucky dying of pneumonia. Try as he might, Steve can’t get the thought through his head. He paces the emergency room waiting area with his head downward, hands in his pockets and he still isn’t allowed back to see Bucky. He images what it must have been like to be Bucky, back when they were kids, only it was Steve on the other side of the door and Bucky was left alone with his mounting anxiety and helpless feeling.

Sam had only arrived a few minutes ago following the ambulance, and only after seeing the state that Steve and himself were in, he went to the cafeteria and bought each of them a warm coffee and bagel. Sam too had been quite worked up over Bucky to the point where he had jitters before even taking a sip of his coffee.

They were both tired as ever: in the course of the day, they had flown down to Munich and ran all over town searching for him. After awhile they had believed they were chasing a dead lead and should try the next small town over. If Sam hadn’t suggested that they search through the warehouses in the industrial park, Bucky would have died.

“Is he going to be okay?” Sam asks.

Steve had never been more relieved to see a doctor as when Bucky’s doctor arrived, bearing the news of his condition. There’s an overflow of medical jargon, heavy with a German accent, and the words dissipate before Steve can process them. They key words that Steve catches are that Bucky is stable for now, but he isn’t out of the woods quite yet.

“Can I see him?” Steve asks

“He isn’t awake.”

Steve has waited this long, there isn’t a question of leaving Bucky’s side until he is stable and moved out of intensive care. Steve has doubtless seen worse. So he wants to see him -- he really does -- no matter what condition Bucky must be in.

In his room, Bucky is unspeakably fragile, a tiny human amidst a web of wires. The air hisses through the tube down his throat, and his chest is obscured by bandages and tube that stretches from under them. The bandages are loose, presumably so the nurses can come and flush out his wounds every few hours to prevent infections.

There is such a heaviness in Steve’s chest as he sits in the chair at the bedside and takes Bucky’s hand, holding his cold palm up to his cheek and kisses his fingers.

He measures time by Bucky’s heart-rate monitor.

* * *

 

The doctors have finally removed that horrible chest tube and cleared him from intensive care after five days. Thankfully, that means that Bucky is well enough to be flown over to New York where Bruce and Helen Cho would take care of him. Bucky has been progressing so well, not that Steve had expected anything less out of him. He still hasn’t woken up though, and his fever still stubbornly stays despite the anti-pyretic.

In the afternoon, Steve would visit Bucky in his hospital room, sit at his chair, open the book he brought and read aloud. After reading maybe ten or so pages, he would take a short break, then read another ten pages. He read whatever book he happened to be reading on his own at the time. Sometimes it was a novel, or a biography. It was important that he read the sentences aloud, not the contents of the work.

Steve wasn’t sure if Bucky actually heard his voice or not. His face never showed any emotions. He was thinning, he didn’t move at all, and all breathing was controlled by a tube taped to his lips. His temperature has fallen to 104.3 where it remains stubbornly -- because he’s nothing if not stubborn, even when unconscious -- for at least an hour before he gets another round of medicine. He’s more responsive when a nurse takes knuckles to his sternum thankfully. In the meantime, Bucky’s charts say he’s doing really well. There are still no sign of infection, no sign that he’s getting worse.

It is a small comfort to Steve to know that HYDRA didn’t cut out Bucky’s tongue, or wound his vocal cords in any way like he knew they could. The sound of his voice, his laugh in particular, were things Steve would wait entire lifetimes to hear again. It would have been devastating if he never heard his voice again.

The chair squeaks and shrieks and never feels any more comfortable when Steve sits down. The coffee has gotten better at least, now that he’s at the Compound where Tony buys the most expensive coffee there is. But even humming a song and pacing the room upsets Steve. His voice sounds so thin and it doesn’t do any justice to merely hum in this room.

Bucky had lost his smell. He smelled too clean, too sterilized. He should smell like bourbon and cigarettes and, with the damp hint of sweat after a hard day’s work.

And the silence from Bucky is truly terrible

Steve needs to crawl into bed with him. He belonged there, next to him.

* * *

There’s something down his throat, gagging him, keeping him swallowing and breathing properly, and there’s several other somethings stuck on his chest, in his arm, all around his torso.

Raw panic consumes him as he snaps his eyes open to disorienting bright lights and flails, trying to pull out the obstruction in his throat so he can breathe. The world feels like it’s spinning in slow motion, every move straining and aching his muscles as he kicks at the blankets covering his body.

Before he can understand what is going on, eight pairs of soft yet strong hands grab him and push him back down onto the bed, holding down his thrashing arms and legs, shining more bright lights into his eyes and talking at him. He can’t quite make out whomever is speaking, can’t quite understand what they are saying, like he is listening to people talk underwater. Finally, someone pulls the tube from his throat and he chokes on the air that passes through his lungs, and the air sputters out his lips before he can breathe properly again. He can make out his surroundings, even if they don’t make a lot of sense.

“Please, sir, calm down and stop struggling….” a calm female voice repeats, and he stops for a moment to comprehend. His arms and legs were still shaking and he looked more like a poor cornered animal than anything else. Hesitantly, he relaxes into the bed, letting the people rearrange the tubes and wires that came loose since waking up

The woman who had spoke to him is wearing cheerful green scrubs that match those of others in the room, resticking wires onto his chest and stomach. He looks to his left and notices that all his wires and tubes connect  to a rather dizzying array of medical machinery. It occurs to him then that this is a hospital, or something close to it, and these people are nurses. The very last thing he can remember is someone holding him up as he watched the snow fall, and then the lights, too bright lights.

He tries to speak, but only manages to cough, trying to focus his memory backwards, failing miserably.  What had happened to him? Did they take him back to HYDRA? Was he at the testing facilities?

“Please don’t try to speak,” another nurse, a male one with brown eyes says. “Blink your eyes once for yes, twice for no, understand?”

He blinks once.

“Do you know your name?”

He doesn't have a name. He stares for a moment, looking dumbfounded until he settles with two blinks.

“Do you know where you are?”

He blinks twice.

“You’re at the Avengers Compound, New York.”

Silently, he strains to read the numbers of the digital clock on the wall across from his bed.

He’s in New York, and it’s 6:19 am.

* * *

 

The morning sunlight streamed through the drapes of his apartment, illuminating the sleeping form huddled up on the bed. The small crack in the window lets in the sounds of another D.C day quickly rousing the sleeping man from his bed. Steve blinked a bleary eye open to the sunlight, yawning in his post-sleep confusion. He sat up in bed, rubbing his eyes with his hands. One quick glance to his alarm clock let him know it was almost 10:30. With a sigh, he kicked off his blankets and walked out of his room, not bothering to pick up the comforter and pillows that had landed on the floor.

He stepped out his apartment to gather the mail, still in the boxers and t-shirt he wore to bed last night, too tired to care if anyone saw him. He ran his fingers through his tousled hair, hoping to smooth out the strands that were sticking up at odd angles. After another almost endearing yawn he bent down to gather his mail, not bothering to give the newspaper a second glance. In the seven days that Bucky had been brought back to New York, someone had snuck into the Compound and snapped a few pictures of him while Bucky was sleeping. No one knows how they got in, but all the pictures of him had been up close and too personal to not be considered trespassing.

As he tucked the morning paper under his arm and leafed through his letters and bills, he suddenly froze with the sudden realization he wasn’t alone. Forget not caring that he was only in his boxers and slippers, he was mortified someone would see him and say something. All the color drained from his face, but then he sighed when he saw who was coming up the stairs.

“Morning!” Natasha smiled at him, walking up to Steve’s front door at the end of the hall.

“Didn’t hear you walk up.” Steve said with a sort of half-smile that only curled the left corner of his mouth. He noticed her heels and wondered how she had made it that far without him noticing

“I’m an assassin.” she replied. “You’re not supposed to hear me.”

Steve arched an eyebrow and lifted his head in a silent ‘oh’.

“Uhm.” he started, looking around himself for a moment, suddenly remembering what he was wearing, or lack thereof. “I’m compelled to go cover myself.” he smiled at her one last time and turned away back into his apartment and Natasha followed.

“I don’t mind." Natasha had actually felt a little bad for Steve, though, and frowned a little. He seemed to be a little cold and wore the standard grandpa slippers and striped underpants combination that made him seemed more sad and pathetic than he really was.

“I’ll just put some pants or a robe on just the same.” he looked over his shoulder. “You want a cup of coffee? Or some milk maybe? And more immediately, what are you doing here? I thought our friendly visits ended a few weeks ago.”

Natasha’s “friendly visits” started not long after Steve was released from the hospital, and he fell into a stupor that he couldn’t be shaken out of. Steve had made it his mission to find Bucky, and all he found were half-burned with no beginning or end, pictures that provided a glimpse into the process of creating the Winter Soldier, and a video that went into grueling detail about how his metal arm had been put into place.

Steve was depressed, even more so than he was before, but he didn’t look it, not as he went to Stark Tower for dinner and laughed at the jokes and went with either Sam or Natasha to look for a trail of breadcrumbs Bucky left behind. Everything he did, he had a smile on his face and acted like everything was okay, and looked sad when he thought other people couldn’t see him.

Everyone would drop by his place to ask he was doing from time to time or would call him to ask if he wanted to do anything, but Natasha had been the one to go over more often and call him almost every day to ask if he was alright. Sometimes he was, and other times not so much. He became increasingly listless and hopeless, and anytime Sam asked him if he wanted to go for a run, he’d say ‘thanks, but no thanks’ or ‘i just don’t feel like it’. Steve would shrug it off and say he wasn’t depressed because he wasn’t sad. You have to be sad to be depressed, and he just didn’t feel anything at all.

“Cup of coffee sounds nice.” Natasha said, taking another step toward him. “And I’m here to tell you that Bucky woke up.”

Steve stopped in his tracks with a wide smile despite his frustration that she had kept that from him for so long. He would have expected that she call him the moment something had changed with Bucky.

“You want me to make you a cup of coffee?” Natasha insisted, shutting the door behind herself so that Steve wouldn’t just drop everything and run off to see Bucky. If she wanted Steve to do that, she just would have called him and not have driven the four hours it takes to get to D.C from New York.

“...No.” His eyebrows knit in confusion. “I want to grab my jacket.”  Steve glanced over at the coat rack by the door with his keys and coat handy.

“Let's have a cup of coffee.” Natasha grabbed Steve’s shoulder, almost like she was grounding him. “Or tea. Maybe a nice, soothing tea.”

Natasha found and pulled two mugs out of Steve's cabinet and poured each one full of steaming hot water while Steve sat at the small table by the window, a piece of half finished toast on his plate. They didn't say anything as they listened to the small sounds coming from the kitchen: the fridge door opening and closing, the squeak of the cupboards, and the little plop of milk being poured into the tea.

“Is he going to keep calling?” Steve asked, a sharp hint of frustration in his voice as Natasha came over with their drinks, setting Steve's down next to him before moving to sit in the chair opposite of him. His phone stopped ringing for a moment, bringing it back to the home screen to show he had over ten missed calls from Tony and three from Sam.

“Tony wants you to see him.” Natasha said between sips of her tea.

“And you don’t.” It wasn’t a question. Natasha nods, leaning forward in her chair to rest her elbows on the table.

“Eventually.” Something flickers across Steve’s face but it’s gone before Natasha can think anything of it. She took a breath as she looked over Steve’s figure. He had both his hands wrapped around the coffee mug, not bothering to take a sip, hoping that warmth from the mug itself would be enough to keep warm. He was distraught, looking out the window and then to the ground, but never at Natasha. “Could help to take a step back before we take a step forward.”

That seems to draw Steve’s attention from the window to Natasha, and his eyes are like cut black pieces of flint.

“Help who?” Steve asks, overwhelmed by the confusion, frustration, and hurt that cannot be any less clear as day on his face. When Natasha doesn’t answer and just looks right back at him, he sighs impatiently. “Well?”

Natasha chooses her words carefully, mulling them over in her head before speaking. “When you see Bucky, and I do think you should see him, I want it to be on your terms. I want you to get what you need. I want Bucky to get what he needs. What Tony needs, I’m not as concerned about.” Steve manages a small smile at her bulldogishness in his defense.

Steve takes a long breath through his nose, slow on the exhale, and leaned back into his chair. “Bucky doesn’t have anyone.” He said, changing back to the subject he was most concerned with. In this moment, Steve finds it very difficult to remember a time when he didn’t feel like was falling apart around him, but… but it can’t all be lost , can it? All of it? Of course not.The still hopeful part of Steve reasons with the other more distressed parts of him,  he still has you, you’re still here for him. Natasha had a good reason for being here to give him the short of Bucky’s condition and to brief him about a future Bucky is going to have, and Steve will cling to that for as long he can.

“You can’t be his everyone.” Natasha argued softly, searching Steve’s face for any sign of understanding, but none seemed to be there. He was guarded up, the moment he suspected that anything was wrong.She puts a hand out and delicately cups around the bones of Steve’s wrist, his pulse there jumping out at her. “You need to draw a line, and know where your place is and--"

Steve doesn’t give her a chance to finish before Steve is jerking his hand away like Natasha had just touched with with a red hot poker. The look he gives her is full of disdain. “Keep my distance?” Steve snaps, and he didn’t mean to sound so angry, but trying not to be angry about this was making him feel much worse. "You want me to stay away from him?"

“Steve, you can’t treat Bucky like he’s some dog-”

“I’m not collecting a stray dog.” Steve feels like his tongue has swollen in his mouth, his throat closed up with it, so as to not let a single breath pass in or out. He shrinks back into his seat and folds his arms into his chest, making himself smaller while Natasha watches him with noiseless hesitance. She lets him reel on his own admission, thinking it over again and coming to terms with it. Bucky was the Winter Soldier, and even though his actions may have been admissible or justifiable, the assassin that she knew wasn’t scared of anything. He manipulated and lied, and that made him dangerous. Anyone that got to close to the Soldier had ended up dead.

“Steve we can’t trust him right now. You can’t trust any of this to be what it seems. Our job was just to bring him in, you know that.”

Steve didn’t say anything as he took a sip of his tea, as if it will push away the uncomfortableness of their conversation away. It of course, doesn’t.

“Tony’s wrong about Bucky.” Steve said definitively, resting his tea into his lap. Natasha doesn’t press the issue any longer, but most certainly takes note of his reaction.

“Let me reach out to Bucky first, in my own way.”

* * *

 The worst part about waking up was waking up at all.

A doctor, Bruce Banner, came in when the Soldier had just woken up from what felt like a lifelong nightmare and proclaimed him lucky. If he wasn't so snowed under and groggy from the drugs and sleep, he would have gladly tore his stitches open to swipe away all those pleased teeth from the doctor's face. Luck had nothing to do with this. Living meant living with everything that he did or didn’t do.  Behind every lazy drop of his eyelids, the Soldier would see, smell even, his blood dripping across the ocean. They still haven't caught Alexander Pierce or Brock Rumlow and the Soldier didn't need anyone to confirm it; he knew as much the minute he opened his eyes.

The grim Soldier's thoughts showed on his face and Dr. Banner didn't bother him with anymore charming notions. A nervous nurse helped him sit up as much as he was allowed and another doctor, Dr. Cho gave him the short of his condition - the key word was okay. They tell him that he has chronic hypothermia, malnutrition, pneumonia, and had collapsed lung on top of it; but he didn’t know if that accounts for the hallucinations and mental confusion.  

The room was stark white with glass sliding doors that led to what he assumed was a medical bay of some sort with a nurses station opposite. There was an armed guard that stood by the threshold of the door,  his back turned to Bucky and checking ID before anyone came him. He also told the person entering the room something, but he couldn’t quite make it out. There was also a fresh looking vase of red poppies sitting on the windowsill, but there’s no card to indicate who sent them.

As the day passed the only people that came into his room where nurses and other doctors to replenish his fluids or to ask how he was doing. It had nothing to do with pleasantries, instead the only questions they asked were to make sure he didn't have any problems that they didn’t see in their preliminary exams. But as the evening set, a visitor came. Natasha walked in, and she looked as she always did. Blank. Unreadable, as much as the Soldier knew about Natasha, he truly knew nothing about her at all.

“Good morning. How are you feeling today?” Her voice was detached and slow, but he could see that she was trying to be pleasant, but neither of the two was in the mood for such thing. She must have sensed the pained species of anger radiating off Bucky because after one glance at him and a flicker of observant regard across her face, her face drops into something serious. Natasha stood at the edge of the Bucky’s bed, one hand on the tray to the side of her, and got down to what really mattered. “Tony gave us some room to breathe. He held off the charges until the end of the month. By then I’ll figure something out.”

"That doesn't mean anything now that Shield has no credible reputation. That means your out of the job." He assumed the latter of the two sentences.

“I still have my connections.” Natasha paused again, visibly strained by thoughts and hesitation. The ever so slightest tilt of her head and the way she barely stuck out her tongue before biting down on her bottom lip told the Soldier as such.

“I’m getting locked up again, aren’t I?” The Soldier noticed the officer pacing for the third time outside his room.

“Tony put them there but… don’t worry. I’ll do something about it.”

“Something, huh?” There was a sour smile on his face. He closed his eyes momentarily to hide their roll and suck his head back into the pillow.

Nothing Natasha could do would help him, as much as Natasha wanted to, or felt obliged to. If Bucky couldn’t help himself, no one else would. Perhaps it was high time to be a little selfish.

Natasha pulled away back to the far wall and toward the door. “Read the papers.” she told him as she went to the door and stopped at the frame to turn with a few more bits of news. “Steve Rogers is going to visit you soon.”  She told him before turning away down the hall.

* * *

 Tony’s office, the entire floor that he dedicated to himself, is on the top floor. Natasha reached it flushed after a fast walk from Bucky’s room toward the bottom of the Tower. She would have otherwise went straight to Steve like promised --  but Tony’s summons said now. She passed Clint and Steve near the nurses station, smiling at them both briefly before continuing.

No one was in the outer office, so she fluffed her hair briefly by her reflection in the glass door.

She found Tony with Banner and Sam in his office. Tony was standing at his desk talking on the phone while Bruce and Sam were seated in the chairs in front of the desk twiddling their thumbs and waiting for the call to end. Tony ended the call with a sharp “No”, hung up the phone, and grabbed what looked like Bucky’s file from under his arm and opened it.

“Natasha. Morning.” he said, briefly glancing up at her before taking a seat.

“Tony.” Her smile was only polite.

“I wanted to talk to all of you about Bucky.” Tony said, looking at each of them, then motioning to an empty seat. “Take a seat, Nat.”

Natasha did as told, sitting to the left of Bruce and furthest away from Sam.

“I have seventy families waiting.” Tony began, his voice intense and strong. “No, let me rephrase, demanding that we find the killer of their loved ones and deliver justice. James Buchanan Barnes is the only person we can ask who might know the truth.”

“Well, you can't ask Bucky anything right now." Natasha responds, attempting to hopefully get this conversation moved along so she can get Steve before anyone else gets to him first. “We have to create a safe place for him to answer questions. He is a very smart man, and he'll know immeidently if your trying to get something out of him he doesn't want to share. He'll shut down the minute he suspects anything or manipulate you. 

“I respect your sympathy for him, Romanov.” Tony was the first one to respond,  his smarmy voice cutting through the otherwise calm air. “One day I hope you’ll respect my lack of it.”

“I’ve some respect.” she replied shortly.

“You and Steve are the only people on record to survive out of seventy." Sam notes, redirecting the conversation. He flipped through some of the papers in the file.

"In Bucky's mind, that means he's only gotten to sixty eight." Everyone looks at Natasha as she speaks. "When he learns the entirety of his actions."

“He may already know about them.” Bruce adds slowly, almost hesitantly.  “We don’t know where his mind was yet when he committed those crimes, or where is mind is now for that matter.”

“You really think Bucky helped Alexander Pierce choose those people? That he was aware of what he was doing?”

“I think it's a possibility that needs to be ruled out.” Tony sighs, responding for Bruce. “If he wasn’t in any way more responsible as a pawn, he still may know  more about who helped and where HYDRA bases are.”

Sam turned to Natasha then. “How was Bucky?” he asks “When you saw him, talked to him.”

“Surprisingly practical.” she confirms, nodding shortly toward Sam.

“Suspiciously practical?” Tony chirps in.

“I would suggest that Bucky can be practical without being a serial killer or an assassin.” Said Sam.

“I think he’s hiding something.”

“It may simply be trauma.” Bruce added, knowing that Natasha would be more than thankful for his input instead of just staying quiet while she and Tony continue to burn unnecessary fires. “Now, we know enough about Bucky in those files to say that he likely was subject to all sorts of testing that would cause PTSD, depression, anxiety, hallucinations, and a whole other sort of mental and physical trauma.”

“It could also be more.” Natasha said, voice calm and distant. “Bucky, or the Winter Soldier, has a penchant for manipulation, withholding information to gain information. He demonstrates enough emotions only to prove he has them.”

“Appreciating my lack of sympathy?” Tony replies with a brief smile, eyes on Natasha.

“Only providing a psychological evaluation based off previous history with him.”

“You said it may be more than trauma yet you question his involvement in the crimes Pierce committed.” Sam said, looking towards Natasha and then to Bruce as if they had all the answers. “What are trying to get at?”

"We're questioning his state of mind, both then and now." Bruce answered, reaching out to take the flimsy pile of papers that made up Bucky’s file. “We know memories, emotions, and even spiritual experiences can be manipulated while under hypnotics and sometimes other things as well, but I’d have to look more into that.” He rambled on, flipping through the first few pages, and if the look on his face was enough to go by, Sam would say that they had a strong enough defense for Bucky in court. “I think that’s what happened to Bucky. I also think that they got into his head, quite literally, and, for lack of better word, fumbled around in there. I would need a brain scan to confirm, but I want his fever to break and a physicist to talk to him before we start giving him tests. ”

“I want Steve to talk to him.” Tony said definitively.

“Tony. Not yet.”

“Natasha, you do not get to dictate whom Bucky sees.”

“For all intents and purposes, yes, but Steve is not entirely objective on this.” Sam says. “Steve has a compassion for Bucky after all probably greater than anyone else in this room, best friends since the 30’s, fought side by side in the war… ”

“Then who better to create a safe place for him to answer questions?”

* * *

 Steve came quietly into the room, catching Bucky’s attention. His clothes slightly more skewed than proper, eyes too carefully made up suggesting something was amiss.

“Oh, Buck,” his voice quavers once with something approaching heartbreak, reaches out a hand to touch Bucky’s gauze-wrapped head but aborts halfway across, fingers quivering suspended mid-air. “What happened?”

He happened, Bucky thinks, but he opens his mouth, has to fight the words through his abused throat, says, “I don’t know.”

No matter how often Steve had thought of this moment, whatever he rehearsed saying or doing, was all gone now with nothing left but the overwhelming, heart-stopping fear that at any second Bucky would withdraw within himself. And he might as well do that with the fact that he’s in a place he doesn’t recognize with even more people he doesn’t know. Right now, though, he’s thankful that there’s nowhere Bucky could make a break for it; he couldn’t lose Bucky again.

For one ephemeral moment time had stood still. The rain hung suspended in the shadowy sky. The blood in his veins froze. The pump of his heart fell away into nothing. Steve’s arm had still been hanging in the air, and everything seemed to move in slow time. He wanted to touch Bucky, to make sure that he was still there and not just another one of his dreams, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t bring himself to ruin this bubbleskin of time they had together. But then everything all came rushing back with the tick of a clock and the beat of Bucky’s heart monitor.

Steve’s hand fell to his side and he took a shuddering breath.

“I…” was the only thing Steve could get out of his mouth. “You’re okay.” his voice sounded weak and shaky, and that shouldn’t have surprised him given that his heart felt like his heart was going to burst out of his chest.

And Bucky hasn’t stopped looking at Steve since the moment he walked in, but he looked different now. Somehow, his face had changed, less detached and more interested than anything else, like he was seeing Steve for the first time and trying to figure out what exactly he was or what he wanted.

Steve remembered to breathe, his chest tight with stopping to breathe after a few breathes while his heart kept thrumming away. “Bucky?” His voice even quieter than the moment prior, so, so afraid that Bucky would turn away from him and shut himself away.

Bucky gave Steve a once over and blinked up at him. Eventually, Bucky’s lips parted as if he knew what he wanted to say, but couldn’t get the words to come. When the words do come, his voice sounded wet as if he was about to start crying. “I know you. ”

That was all Steve needed. He let out another breath, fighting down the choked sob that was clawing at his throat, his heart was tight and twisting, and his face was so warm all he could hear was the sound of blood rushing in his ears. But the relief had hit him in the same way when he found Bucky at that Hydra base.

Steve walked slowly over to the chair next to Bucky’s bed, but he stopped the moment when he saw Bucky’ body tense while still keeping eye contact with him in the same way a dog reacts when cornered.

Steve’s hands rose to about to his chest to show he wasn’t going to do anything. “I’m not gonna hurt you.” Steve added, voice a little more confident, reassuring. He could see that Bucky was thinking, the gears in his mind kept twisting against each other. But his heart rate never rose above eighty-five. Then the expression on his face broke for a moment, his jaw bunched with resistance like he was trying to fight the words from coming, but finally he said:

“You’re Steve Rogers. That man you said I was - James Buchanan Barnes - is dead.” The words seemed to be strained and sharp, reflecting the conflict he felt in his head. The last sentence sounded like an accusation, as if somehow he knew who was responsible. Maybe he did. “But I’m him, aren’t I?.”

Steve hadn’t known what to say to make sense of everything to Bucky. His eyes burned with fresh tears and his chest hurt more than before.

“Yes,” Steve could only say. He took another step closer, and then one more, as if something was pulling him forward to convince him that he wasn’t in fact making any of this up.

Bucky didn’t flinch, not even stiffening his body. He just stared at him, jaw bunching up.

Steve couldn’t bear to keep the distance any longer, no matter whether it was smart and sensible or not. The last two steps between them were crossed in an instant, and Steve wrapped his arms around Bucky, hugged him as tightly as possible, Bucky’s injuries acting accordingly, and Steve let up a little bit after Bucky groaned. He hadn’t thought he’d ever be able to do this. Bucky had been dead, gone from his life forever.

And even when he had Bucky in his arms back in that warehouse,  even when he smiled up at Steve and looked so relieved that someone had came for him, even when Steve had been ready to lay down his life if it meant he didn’t have to kill Bucky on the helicarrier, none of it had compared to this moment. Not when he got to hold Bucky so closely and not have to worry about Bucky dying in his arms, and only try to focus on breathing, trying not to sob and break down in front of the person he’d thought he’d lost, never to come back to him again. Steve’s heart stops when he can feel Bucky relax into him, turning his forehead into the crook of his neck and wrapping his arms under his arms so his hands were resting on his shoulders.

They’re at an awkward angle now, Steve bent almost in the shape of an L and Bucky sitting up as far as he can manage without making it feel like his ribs are going to poke out of his skin. Steve is the first one to let go and drew back and let his arms fall back to his side. He looked down at Bucky, and gave a small smile.

Frankly, Bucky looked horrible. There were dark rings around his eyes that made it look like his eyes were just sucken dark pits that led to very dark places. His pallor of his skin was somehow whiter than the snow outside. He wasn’t the same man Steve had left behind in the war, the handsome, clean-shaven young man he had once been. So much has happened to Bucky, he is a changed man. Who knows if he’ll ever go back to the person he used to be in another life.

The look that Bucky gives him then is hard to place- Bucky was blank, unreadable, until there was the slight lift in the corner of his mouth and his jaw bunched. His face was muddled, as if Steve did something that was unheard of to him.

There was a soft click and a woosh of air as the door opened, pulling Steve and Bucky’s attention toward Tony who was just now walking in.  There was a presence about him that made Bucky deflect his eyes toward his hands in his laps. He can hear the heart rate monitors beeping away at a faster pace now, and he has to control his breathing to get it to lower.  It takes everything in Bucky to not get his heart rate above what it considered reasonable for a man in his position.

If Steve or Tony notice anything out of the ordinary, the don’t say anything, for which Bucky is thankful.

“Steve.” Tony says and Bucky can still feel Tony’s eyes directed at him like flood lights. “A word.”

Steve nods and gives Bucky’s shoulder a grounding touch and says he’ll be right back. Bucky follows his footsteps out of the room, doesn’t hear the door close.

"How is he? Bucky." Bucky could hear Tony say from the hall.

"Traumatized. Bucky thanked me after we found him. Thanked me for not giving up on him. But I did. I gave up on trying to find him. I thought he was dead, and I was crazy."

"But he's here now, Steve." Tony said gently. "But right now, I need him to talk to the investigators." 

“He’s not testifying.” Steve’s voice comes through in a controlled whisper. He was angry.

“Steve, five days and we’ll be done asking him questions. He doesn’t have to sit up. We’ll go through the-”

“How strong is our case?”

A pause.

“Well, Steve, you know where we stand. You know where the CIA, the FBI, and the rest of the world stands. This isn’t a question about whether or not Bucky is going away. This is about whether he gets a stand-in-a-circle-holding-hands-sing-Kumbaya sentence or a federal-fuck-me-in-the-ass sentence. I think you know what’s in Bucky’s future and--”

“You know what would make me really happy, Tony?”

Tony didn’t say anything, and Steve kept going.

“It would make me very happy if Bucky could go the rest of his life without anyone giving him a reason to think about Alexander Pierce or any member of HYDRA ever again. It would make me very happy if Bucky never had to go back and revisit everything that was done to him. Do you understand?”

“I admire that, Steve, I do, but let's talk about reality for a second.”

Footsteps.

“Steve, for god’s sake, he’s in here on hospital heroin, eating through a tube, and you think you and a few investigators asking questions is gonna upset his fucking equilibrium?”

Bucky turns over onto his side, covers his ears with his hands until the conversation stops. He sees the red poppies on the nightstand, and Bucky sees blood spilling across snow.

When Bucky looks back over his shoulder after a while (Bucky made sure he would have his ears covered for a long time) he glances over his shoulder and sees that Tony is nowhere to be seen behind the inch of glass. Just the guards and guns intact.

Steve came back awhile later with Natasha and a glass of water in hand.

Which way to go?  Steve thought upon entering the room. Sometimes it was easier to be impersonal to drop something like this. With Bucky, he didn’t want to be. He put the glass on Bucky’s tray.

“You  can drink it if you want.” Steve told him. Bucky didn’t take him up on that offer.

“We just want to talk to you, is that okay?” Natasha said as Bucky stared blankly down at the glass of water. “Don’t be scared. We’re just trying to piece together a lot of things and we hope that you can help us.”

Bucky had been frightened and a little standoffish at first, but when Natasha said “don’t be scared”, he believed her -- until three other people came into the room, one with a white lab coat like doctors wear, but not Bucky’s doctor, Helen Cho, and another investigator with a CIA windbreaker.

Bucky’s panic must have been written plainly on his face. Maybe he wouldn't have been so worried if he’d understood a little better what wasn’t clear to him at the time: that he was sick, and that he wasn’t in a good position to be answering questions for an official interview -- which is why anyone even vaguely considered his advocate had been called in. But Bucky understood, when he saw all those faces and a tape recorder in the middle of the tray meant for his food, was that everyone in the room was going to be a deciding factor in his fate and dispose of him as they saw fit.

Stiffly, Bucky endured a series of warm up questions about what his name was or about how he was feeling until it became clear to everyone that the small talking wasn’t going to loosen him up.

Steve pulled up a chair to the side of Bucky’s bed. He had that all-American war hero look to him from his tousled blond hair, baby blue eyes. Everything about him suggested valor except for the exhaustion he wore in his eyes.  “We just want to know what you remember,” he said. “Get a general picture of what happened, you know? Because maybe by remembering the small things, you might remember something that will help us.”

“Like what?”

“Like what you remember the morning of April 7, 2014.” The man in the windbreaker said.

“Um -” Bucky stared at the watch on Steve’s  wrist. This wasn’t what he was expecting to ask so suddenly. The truth was: he didn’t pay attention to the time of day, just the job that had to be done, but that didn’t sound helpful in Bucky’s mind.

“You don’t remember?”

“Alexander Pierce dropped me off at the airport in Newark.” He burst out desperately.

“Oh yeah?” the man with the windbreaker on said. “Did he drop you off personally?”

“Yes.” Bucky could feel everyone looking at him.

Then Steve said, “There’s no need to invent an answer if you don’t know or remember.”

The man in the windbreaker with a tablet in hand gave Steve a sharp warning glance.

“Actually, there seems to be some memory impairment.” interjected Cho in a low voice. “He hit his head while in Munich and couldn’t remember his name when he woke up, and he still is unsure of who he is. We also have reason to believe his memory was impaired while under Hydra’s influence.”

“Is that true?” the man in the lab coat said, glancing up at Bucky frankly.

“Yes.”

The man was about to say something again, but after a sharp look from the CIA investigator (who Bucky later learned his name: Declan), fell silent.

“Look, Bucky.” Natasha said. “I know you want to help, don’t you?” Bucky nodded. “That’s great. But if you don’t know the answer to something? It’s okay to say you don’t know.”

“We are just going to throw some questions out there and see if you can draw you memory out about anything at all.” Declan said. “Are you alright with that?”

“Yeah.”

“Now,” he said, looking up with a smile from his tablet. “How long do you think you were aware of your actions on April 7th?”

“I don’t know. A while afterward, I guess.”

“You guess or you know?”

“I guess.”

“You think it was less than a month, more than a month?”

“I don’t think it was any less than a month.” Bucky said after a long pause.

“Describe to us the moments leading up to your drop off at…” He looked back down at his notes. “Union Station.”

“I didn’t see anything that happened. I was put onto a train with three other handlers and was unconscious for most of it. I don’t know. Just….” Bucky added when Declan kept on looking at him like he expected more.

In the silence that followed, Bucky heard a clicking: The man in the lab coat in the back, head down, discreetly checking his phone for messages.

Declan cleared his throat. “What about Pierce or Brock Rumlow?”

“What?”

“Did you notice anything out of the ordinary for either men?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Nothing? Not at all? You sure?”

As the questioning went on -- the same thing over and over again, switched around to confuse him, with every now and then something new -- Bucky hunkered down in himself and waited hopelessly for them to leave him alone. Bucky would simply have to admit it to them that he worked for Hydra (which they already had substantial evidence for) and face his consequences (probably fairly dire, since he was well on his way to becoming a ward of the State Prison). At a couple of questions, Bucky was close to tears, on the verge of blurting out in his terror. But the more questions they asked (Where he was when he fell in 1944? Who had been in charge of him? Where he was when he forgot the day’s events) the more it became clear to Bucky that they didn’t know anything about what had happened to him -- what places in Russia, the United States, Europe he had been to, or even if Bucky was aware that he had killed people.

They had a floor plan of an abandoned warehouse or something; the rooms had numbers in maze like arrangements all the way up to 30. “Do you recognize any of this?” Declan said, pointing. “Or down here how about this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Take your time.”

“I don’t know.” Bucky repeated, a bit frantically. The diagram of the rooms had been confusing, computer generated quality, like something he’d seen Brock show him before heading out for another mission.

“Nothing you remember at all about the facility you were kept in?”

“Well, I mean -- there was bars and it was a room almost like a vault except there was medical machinery.”

“Were their staircases, an elevator? What did the men who worked there wear?”

“There were both staircases and an elevator. And the men were in white outfits, except for the strike team who were all in black and wore body armour.”

The questing dragged on. What do you remember about the environment were you in? A certain smell you remember? Who would go in and out of your room the most? Was there a safe haven for you should Hydra fail? What about Pierce? And Rumlow? What was the primary goal Hydra had for you? Do you know the location of any Hydra bases? Bucky looked at the pictures they showed him -- innocent, vacant faces, nobody he recognized. Passport photos of himself from the 1950s to the 1990’s. Photo’s of men, women, children of all ages and race -- ordinary faces, unmemorable yet all somehow made up of tragedy. They went back to the diagram. Could Bucky just maybe try again? Here, or here? What about there?”

“I don’t know.” Bucky kept on saying it: partially because he wasn’t sure, partly because he was scared and anxious for the interview to be over, but also because there was an air of restlessness and impatience from the room. The others seemed already to have agreed silently among themselves that Bucky didn’t know anything, and should be left alone.

And then, before he knew it, it was over. “James.” said Declan, closing his tablet and placing a hand on his shoulder. “I want to thank you for doing what you could.”

“That’s okay.”  Bucky said jarred, by how abruptly it had all come to an end.

“We’re not going to put you through all of this again.” Natasha said. “but we’re going to stay here for a while. Just to say hi and keep an eye on you.”

“At the very least we can help underwhelm you while you’re being overwhelmed.” Steve adds

“I don’t know which is worse,” Bucky’s voice was strained like he was in pain. “Believing that I did it, that I made those choices to kill people. Or believing that someone would do this to me and force me to.” He looked at Steve. “Do you believe me when I say that I didn’t have any part in the planning? That I didn’t want to do this?”

Steve searched his heart – he didn't want to lie. “Yes,” he said. “We don’t know everything that happened, Bucky, but I believe you would never intentionally hurt anyone.” He had never felt so helpless – he was used to finding answers, to fixing things, and there was nothing here he could fix. Bucky, whom he loved, was going to to prison, likely for the rest of his life, and there was nothing, nothing he could do about it.

* * *

 

Bucky’s temperature slowly falls and rises unsteadily, before holding between 102 and 103. He is fuzzy, dry-mouthed, aching when he’s awake, restless and delirious when he sleeps. If he sleeps. He can’t tell the difference between waking moments and when he’s sleeping. The days and nights pass, forgettable as breathing in and out. The clock on the opposite wall is no longer readable unless he strains his eyes, so he tracks time by the shadows, by his visitors and their touches.

Steve’s hands wrestle the fine line that Natasha told him about between personal and professional interest so that he does not get too close to him. He always finds the space right between his hand and arm, a polite, honest compromise that Bucky finds comforting. His hands are also unusually cool,  something Bucky finds soothing especially when Steve’s fingers linger just a little longer than necessary on his forehead. If he touched his forehead a little longer than needed, maybe they could forgo the ice bath he keeps hearing about.

Natasha has taken up rubbing his arm and putting cool towels on his forehead. She  brushes his knotted and unkempt hair back out of his face, the only time he allows anyone to ever touch his hair.

Helen Cho and Bruce Banner continue to monitor his vitals: checking his pupils with a pen light (shushing or outright ignoring Bucky’s feeble grumbles). The nurse on the day shift is a veteran of the craft, and Bucky knows her touch from how stern and strong she is when pulling his fingers from his butterfly IV or shoving a thermometer in his ear. The nurse on nights is younger, still timid, but she draws blood like a pro and doesn’t use silly pet names, for which Bucky is grateful.

The dawn finally takes him to sleep and he dreamt of a hospital, spotless, glistening metallic hues. Cold and wet. A familiar set of regal, dark eyes watched him and a grief stricken voice asked why.

A violent jerk woke him. Gasping, he wrapped his arms around himself defensively, and the IV in his forearm kinks and alarms go off. Through the fog of his memory he vaguely recalled a glint from something small and sharp, but no dread followed him outside the dream, instead a wistful sentiment, soon to be replaced by a painful solitude.

“We can put you in for a psych consult,” Steve tells him gently, as the night nurse is sponging the sweat from his forehead.

“No,” Bucky says feebly into his pillow. “No, I don’t want that,” His eyes are sore from staring at the wall, vigilant against unwanted memories. “I wanna be left alone.”

Something went into his IV drip. He didn’t dream anymore.

* * *

 

"...retrograde amnesia. Usually sustained by physical trauma, but occasionally it can also be caused by psychological trauma," The doctor (the person in the lab coat from the interview) smiles at him genially, sets his hand down dangerously close to his on the bed. An open invitation, the physical representation of bridging boundaries both physical and mental. Mental Bereavement Counseling 101.

"James," here he leans in closer, lowers his voice in mock-sympathy, hand inching that much closer, cornering the poor feral animal. "You know you can talk about anything with me."

His eyes are brown, Bucky knows, from the single quick glance he'd taken of the doctor’s face. Brown eyes, short coiffed brown hair, a neatly kept beard, a dark navy blue suit above a red tie and white shirt, marriage ring he rubbed out of habit  as if to reassure himself it was still there. His hands when he'd grabbed his in greeting had been soft, civilian, perhaps beginning to melt in age. Some powdered, pressed, and the smell of a musky cologne was enough to make Bucky cringe his nose and shake his head. It had been wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Bucky deflects his gaze to the other side of the room, shifts restlessly and jerks his hand away ten notches too abruptly to be considered socially acceptable. The flowers on the nightstand are the only red things in the white room. They gleam vibrantly, the color of open wounds, and Bucky imagines blood crawling down his abdomen, sneaking into the hem of his pants damp and warm like a lover's fingers.

“James?” The lines between his brows deepen unattractively when he frowns. The meat of his face is beginning to sag with age. How Arnim Zola would have seen him: an animal like any other. Suffused in water, his cells soaked in interstitial fluid. Unappealing, ordinary. All animals are the same when you peel apart their skin, pry open the skull.

Bucky licks the cracks over his lips. “Yes, of course,” he says, his eyes trained on the negative space between his shoulder and his earlobe, at a crack in the paint on the walls. His voice rasps. It will for a while. It might always. “I’m sorry. I haven’t been feeling myself lately.”

The doctor --whose name starts with an F or something. Franklin? Frederick?-- smiles, frown lines disappearing shifting into new ones, pleased by the perceived progress. “Of course, perfectly understandable.” He paused, smiling. “Have you been feeling overwhelmed, James?”

“Is that what I’m feeling?” Bucky’s voice is very quiet, but the sarcasm still comes through.

“Why don’t you tell me what you’ve been feeling.” he suggests.

“I haven’t.” Bucky rasps. He clears his throat. His mouth tastes like glue.

“Haven’t been?”

“Feeling. I haven’t been feeling.”

Frederick holding a clipboard, and this is the first time Bucky has seen him use it during this conversation. “I’m glad you shared that with me. It’s not uncommon for victims of-”

“I know why.” He sounds his words out slowly, deliberately, angry. “Everyone knows why. I’m done talking to you and everyone one else… about why.”

The doctor finishes jotting his notes down in silence and outside the nurse has stopped humming and quietly begun to mumble the chorus of  “Moonage Daydream.”

“We’ll have to meet again tomorrow, James.” the doctor informs him from the doorway. “We’ll go over what we talked about and I'll have to give you a few standard tests.”

The next morning, after the doctor has Bucky run through standard psychological tests, he asked the nurse on staff, very nicely, if  she could get him something to read the news with. He didn’t ask specifically for the newspaper, hoping she would come back with something better. It took her awhile to get back, several hours in fact, but she came with a tablet he could have for a short period.

It was more than enough for what Bucky wanted to check.

The news of his apprehension was everywhere, even a week after the fact. But this wasn’t the news he was looking for. Not entirely, at least. CNN was the one site he was really interested in: they had a lot of early scoops and a thousand hints too many thanks to their inside coverage of Captain America and the fall of SHIELD.  Plenty of the articles talked about how far the assassins went, but not all the way back. There was no mention of what had been done to him and the training it took to get him to the skill set he posses today. Tacky titles were included. Only one article mentioned the man, Johann Schmidt, who was responsible for dropping the ball. Only six included Alexander Pierce. Articles were filled with images from crime scenes, blood still fresh on the walls. But also with the images of bed-stricken people.

Bucky barely recognized himself, with all the apparatus, tubes and needles going through him; an image that was probably taken moments after he was brought there. The title above suggested with unkind words his involvement with the leader of HYDRA and the context was full of wild speculations, lucky guesses and a handful of accusations that would make SHIELD and HYDRA, or what was left of it, nervous.

Bucky’s nerves were beyond rattled, but he held onto that tablet with steady hands and continued to scroll until he found what he was looking for. He knew it was there, it had to be. That one article that would push the already spilled glass over the table. For good measure and less guilt.

The title was simple, at least, but that was a small favor.

_James Buchanan Barnes - Victim or Accomplice?_

Bucky read no further. He turned off the tablet and buzzed the nurse to come get it.

Bucky meets Sam Wilson and Clint Barton on his sixth day. Sam he recognizes almost immediately, apologizes too, for kicking him off a helicarrier. Clint doesn’t say much, just smiles and brings him water or magazines when he asked for it. Neither of them said much to each other. Most of the time, they read or when Bucky was sleeping they would put the sports channel on. Despite Bucky’s complete lack of interest in sports, he didn’t bother them to turn it off.   

They paid little to no attention to one another, but they stayed up with him when Steve wasn’t there on his bad nights, when he had a hard time breathing and his lungs hurt so bad he couldn’t sleep, trying to give him any form of comfort and working the oxygen mask over his face. Once, when the nurse was three hours late with Bucky’s pills, Clint followed her expressionless into the hall and there delivered, such a tense and eloquent reprimand that the nurse was somewhat mortified; and afterwards the nurse - who ripped off the bandages around his IV with such callousness, and poked him black and blue in search of veins - was much gentler in handling him, and once, while checking his temperature, called Bucky 'darlin’.

 

* * *

 

“I want to go home,” Bucky tells anyone who’ll listen. But he doesn’t have a home. He doesn’t want to go back to Europe, or to the small metal and concrete cages they locked him up in. But he doesn’t want to be in this hospital room with people pitying him, and the monitor’s beep and shuffle of metal tables puts him on edge.

Steve rubs his arm and says. “I know. They just have to run a few more tests.”

He wanted Dr. Cho back instead of the nurses. Her hands are always professional and pragmatic. She touches Bucky’s forehead to gauge his temperature, Bucky’s wrist to measure his pulse, Bucky’s feet to test his reflexes. There are machines to do all that - Bucky can hear them dimly over the hum of heat and heavy heartbeats in his body.But the the night nurse smiles at him supportively and apologizes for his extended stay. She knows the least and tries the hardest. Bucky is struck with the sudden impulse to tear out his IV and stab her in the neck with it.

Bucky’s heart rate climbs, he breaks into a cold sweat and trembles so violently that the whole room seems to vibrate along with him. “I’m sorry,” the nurse apologizes again and runs a gloved hand along the metal appendage.

“Don’t touch me,” Bucky says in the Winter Soldier's voice. Or maybe it’s the Soldier speaking in his voice. Bucky can’t tell the difference.The nurse removes her hand. She apologizes once more, sadly, and then leaves the room.

Bucky stopped sleeping altogether after that. Steve is the first one to notice. Bucky knows because the next morning when Steve arrived bearing gifts and a smile on his face, suddenly he freezes and he smile goes away, staring at Bucky for a moment. His smile returns for short moment before setting the bag of gifts onto the bedside chair. His first question becomes, “How’d you sleep?”

It’s obvious how he slept: the bed’s unmade with the corners of the fitted sheet undone where he had tugged at them, the sheets and his hospital gown are soiled with sweat. Bucky wears his exhaustion in every pore of his body, from the fine tremors thrumming through him to the dark pits that have become his eyes to the fine pallor of his skin.

“I slept fine, thank you.” Bucky watches as Steve’s brow furrowed with concern, and takes several steps closer to the bed while maintaining a cool air of caution. Bucky sees Steve as Captain America then, so valiant, dauntless, and selfless, back when they had been each other's targets, when Steve could have easily been another one of his victims had he not looked into his eyes. It was no wonder why Alexander Pierce wanted him dead

Bucky doesn’t meet Steve’s eyes so Steve instead looks at the heart monitor. “Your temperature’s up again.” He sighed.

“I hate those monitors.” Bucky mutters. His heartbeat looks like waves on the ocean, the numbers flicker too quickly on the screen. Bucky sees his reflection in it, buts only his face, distorted by inky, empty blackness. He looks away, back to his hands folded in his lap.

“I can’t think of any anti-pyretic they haven’t tried yet.” Steve notes.

“Well, they could try treating the cause.”

“They’re working on that, Bucky.”

“Not hard enough apparently.” he’s trying not to sound too sullen, but the effort is just making him angrier. They’ve been running all sorts of tests, drawing vial and vial of his blood, pumping him full of fluids and drugs, and his head hurts more than it did weeks ago, years ago even. Bucky’s lungs hurt from trying to keep up with his heart, and his eyes burn with fresh tears. He doesn’t even know how long he’s been there, or how long they intend to keep him. He thought he was brought here so that he could be treated, but not this place is seeming more and more like a prison each day. He wants to go home and he wants to leave now.

Steve takes his hand this time. “Bucky, you need to calm down.”

“I’ve been calm.” He has to force himself to keep from gritting his teeth, his breathing coming in faster.

“You need to stay calm. These things take time, but you have the best doctors working to try and figure out what’s wrong and how to treat you.”

“Oh, I think we already know what’s wrong with me.” He opens his eyes. He wonders if Steve bleeds as nice as he smells. One little cut to the side of Steve’s neck would let him know.  "And I don’t think they’ve invented a test for it yet.”  

The knowing is etched into Steve’s face. His brow doesn’t crease but Bucky can see it furrowed; his eyes stay fixed but they’re looking though Bucky, past the film of perspiration, through his skin, between the sinews, all the way to the deep, dark places where killers lurk.

Steve’s hand slips from his, and he takes a step back from the bed. His lips are set into a hard, thin line. He doesn’t  let the hurt cross his face. Bucky wants Steve to leave him alone. Steve’s professionalism sees him backing slowly out of the room and disappearing into the hall without another word, not bothering to gather his coat or the gifts that he brought.

Bucky gags the second he’s gone. He tries the scrub the violence out of skin, but he only finds sweat and tears on his face. Cruelty is deeply embedded within him now; its roots have taken hold. No amount of scrubbing is ever going to tear him free.

* * *

 

Steve was impatient, tapping his foot against the floor, fidgeting with his hands, readjusting himself on the chair every few seconds, and always looking around himself as if he was paranoid. At some point, Natasha touched his leg, forcing Steve to notice of his behavior.

Steve apologizes sadly and looks down at his hands folded in his lap.

“He’s going to be fine, Steve.” Natasha tried to reassure him, but he wasn’t buying it.

“That’s not what I’m worried about, Nat. I know what. It’s just that… you were right.”  Steve’s voice was like a rumor; not even he could believe he was saying it. After all that time, after everything that had been said and done Bucky remembered nothing. After another moment, he continued. “Bucky wants to go home. Let me take Bucky home.”

“What Bucky wants and what he needs are two different things. Taking him out of a controlled environment would be reckless.”

“I thought he was practical.”

“That could just mean he has a dissociative disorder caused by his trauma.” Natasha continued. “You take him home he may experience intense emotions, respond aggressively, or reenact some aspect of a traumatic event without even realizing it.”

“Yes, but there is a scenario where he’s fine.” Steve argued. “They have medications to manage his symptoms. I’ll take him to therapy every day if I have too.”

“Steve, there is no way of knowing what’s waiting for him if he goes home with you.”

Bucky’s ghost was running amok in Steve’s head. He could sympathize with that, perhaps a little too much. His presence was a soothing reminder of the lost things in life he could gain back. But broken cups rarely come back together just the way you want them, if at all. Bucky’s fate... an unfortunate circumstance.

“I prayed I would see Bucky again,” Steve said. His wet eyes continued to be the perfect window into his soul, his thoughts and troubles. His honesty.

“Hey.” she said quietly, her hand smoothing across his cheek and wiping any tear that was there. “ You can't give up hope for Bucky. He’s lost all his hope, which means you can’t. ”

Steve nodded shakily, and Natasha hugged him as tightly as she could with the barrier of the arm of the chair between them. “It’s going to be okay.”

* * *

 

Bucky wakes up in the MRI plagued with his usual pain. Everything’s blurry.  He’s sick to his stomach too, and there isn’t much to make this go away.The loud banging and humming of the machine cuts through the haze of the pain that’s clouding Bucky’s better judgment. His pores rattle in his skin from the reverberations, and he feels his anxiety rising even if his body is too drugged to express it.

"Sergeant Barnes," a voice Bucky doesn't recognize comes over the intercom. The voice sounds English and almost computerized. "We need y-"

“Bucky,” Steve’s voice comes in through the intercom, cutting out the other voice.  “We need you to hold still.  Can you do that for me? We’re almost finished. ”

“Let me out,” Bucky chokes.  He struggles to crawl, but he can’t seem to navigate.  His head’s all wrong.  It tosses helplessly against the frame holding him in place.  “I want out, please. Please, let me out. Please, please, please...”

"Alright, just hold on for a moment."

After a minute, the machine hums and shuts down completely, and soon Bucky feels himself sliding out of the machine. Steve’s at his side and catches his shaking hand in his. He has him, he’s Steve’s, and in this moment, Bucky never wants to disappear again.

Bucky arches his back, trying to lift himself off the table, but whatever they had put in him that had subdued him so completely was still lingering in his system. He can’t get an inch off the table. He closes his eyes, thinking that if he simply can’t see the world in front of him, it simply doesn’t exist. “Don’t let me go,” he holds fast to Steve’s hands.  “Don’t let me go, don’t let me go...”

Another hand - preternaturally cool- comes to rest at his cheek.  “You’re not going anywhere, Bucky.”

Poor choice of words. Bucky really wants to panic now, and the fact that he does causes him more physical pain. They’re going to keep him here forever. Lock him up in a tiny cell, let him out for daily sessions with some half-wit therapist who’ll keep him so snowed under he won’t remember anything what happened to him let alone ever know who he really is.

“You’re right here, Bucky. You.”

“No, no, no: that’s not me anymore, don’t you see?  Don’t you see? Don’t you get it?”  Bucky’s muscles still aren’t cooperating. “I’m not me anymore...I’m not me anymore...”

“Bucky,” Bucky turns his head to face Steve.  “I need you to listen to me right now: they think they’ve found something.  We just need an MRI to confirm.  We just need you to hold still for a few more minutes.  Can you do that?”

“Please don’t let me go.”

"I'm going to be right here waiting for you when you get out."

"You're not going to like what's going to come out of this."

 

“You’re going to come out of there, Bucky.  You.”

Bucky cries.  “That’s the problem.” Because even if they do identify the source of his memory loss, his and his fever comes down, and everything in between, they’ll only treat the symptom, not the cause.  He’ll still wake up not knowing who he is or what he’s doing.  He’ll still want to turn people inside out.  “Just stay with me.” he pleads.

Steve rubs soothing circles in between the space between his thumb and pointer finger.  "Can you lie still for me, Bucky."

He can’t catch his breath.  “I can’t...”

“You can, Buck. Not much longer now.”

Steve’s hand leaves his cheek.  Someone fiddles with his IV port.  “It’s three-seventeen p.m.” Steve tells him. “Say it.”

Bucky’s forearm burns and it starts to spread through his entire body.  “It’s three-seventeen p.m.”

"Very good, Bucky."

But Steve’s voice sounds distant. Bucky feels his hands leave him as his body drifts back into the still, quiet of the MRI.  He tries to remember what he’s supposed to say, tries to focus on situating himself, but then the machine springs to life around him.  Bucky has to squeeze his eyes shut against it.  It’s three-seventeen p.m., he thinks, but then there’s a bright flush of blood behind his eyelids, and Bucky has nightmares.

* * *

 

“James.”

The world has gained weight since Bucky’s been asleep, and it presses down upon every inch of him. His eyelids won’t open, his arms won’t move, and it would be hard to breathe if not for the mask supplying him with a steady supply of oxygen.

“I’ll go get Steve.” the nurse smooths out Bucky’s gown over his shoulder. Bucky follows her footsteps out the door.

“Bucky?”

He follows the voice, opening his eyes just a crack to greet a blurry world.  Bruce’s face hovers close to his bedside, and Natasha and Steve are standing by the door. Bucky recognizes Dr. Banner more from his voice than his features, which have all blended together into a haze of white, brown, and purple.

The thought to cut him new ones doesn’t follow.  Well, it does, but in a self-reflexive way more than anything else when he flashes the penlight into Bucky’s eyes.

“Are you present, Bucky?”

He tries to nod.  Talking seems impossible with how dry his mouth is, but Bucky manages to croak out the only thing he can think to say over the hum of the oxygen machine: “I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to apologize for, Bucky.”

Bruce sounds like he means it too, a fact that triples Bucky’s guilt.  His next breath is a shuddering one.  “I definitely do,” he replies.

"You weren't yourself. That wasn't you."

The only thing heavier than the air in the room is the pain Bucky feels upon hearing that.  His face crumples.  His shoulders curl towards his chest.  The sobs start.  “Yes, I am...”

“No, Bucky,” Bruce says. “The reason you did what you did was because of what Hydra did to you. The scans we did proved it.”

Bucky fights back tears, struggling to comprehend what Bruce s telling him in his snowy state.  “So, what? The...hallucinations, the disassociation, the blackouts ... the assassinations...”

“We won’t know until the psychiatrist talks to you more and your tests come back, but yes, I suspect that the majority of your symptoms can be explained by brain damage.”

Shock descends in a chill on Bucky’s body, one that he simultaneously relishes and eschews.  It’s the first time he’s felt cool in days.  

“Either way, Bucky, I think that I owe you an apology.” Steve says, stepping forward to be closer to Bucky. “ I should have fought for you. I should have kept pushing for them to find you.”

“You,” Bucky stares him down, “have nothing to apologize for. I...have killed people. I shot you. I tried to kill you.”

“And had you not been systematically abused and tortured, you might have thought better about it.” Steve's smile is small, more implication than anything, but Bucky finds himself returning it sadly.

Bucky had stopped them before they had time to leave the room, begging that they, or at least one of them, stay because he was too afraid that he would wake up and this all would have been a mentally constructed fairytale to take him away from the horrors of his cell. He was so afraid that all of this- being saved, given people that care about him, being loved, and cared for - would have not been real. Bucky couldn’t say if he was just thinking of recovering in the hospital not being real, or even if his emotional responses to Steve of affection, would have not been real.

Bucky fell asleep with Steve holding his hand. When Bucky woke up Steve was in the hospital bed with him without his jacket and his shoes, but otherwise fully dressed. He cupped Bucky’s body against his as much as he could do considering Bucky’s IV and injuries.

This is real. The thought cut through Bucky, all those years of blackness. I am not invisible anymore. I am real. I exist. And Bucky finally relaxed back into his arms, his smell, his closeness, and slept.

* * *

 

The first and only time Tony visits Bucky while he’s still admitted to the medical ward he spends the first few minutes pacing the length of the room. Bucky isn’t awake when he first comes in but Tony stands watch as a shivering and incoherent Bucky gets another blanket draped over him. Soon, Bucky does open his eyes and sees the older man sitting down in the bedside chair. His searching gaze is focused on Bucky like flood lights.

“Are you doing alright?” He asks.

Bucky clears his throat with a cough, has to swallow a few times before he can talk. If Tony notices he doesn’t say anything. “ I believe that I am in conscious control of my actions. Given my history, that’s a good day. I would imagine I could be a lot worse off, given the circumstances.”

“I’m not going to apologize for suspecting you were in control of the situation.” There are circles under Tony’s eyes.

“Never expected you to.”

Tony’s gaze is famous among the bureau - the silence that has wordlessly broken a thousand cold-blooded killers. He considers Bucky for a long minute, and Bucky resists the urge to fidget. Tony has always had an incredibly ruthless talent for making other people feel guilty for his own unreasonableness or for things they weren't guilty of.

“You had to investigate me." Bucky says after a long moment. "It was for my best interest. And yours.”

“I’ll see what I can do about getting you cleared and back out there, kid. Rest up.” he says, finally, apparently satisfied. He unfolds himself from his chair, nods quick, perfunctory notion. Bucky nods off thinking this is just some fever dream until he wakes up and finds the extra blanket.  Tony, of course, is gone.

Steve’s touch isn’t cautious anymore. He doesn’t withhold himself from Bucky, doesn’t wrestle lines between professionalism and caring. His hand finds his, clutches it, then works his way through his usual, affectionate rounds of adjusting blankets or pillows, brushing his cheek , or, once, playing with his hair.

There’s also something about Steve… Bucky can’t quite articulate it, but if he has to, the word ‘wounded’ comes to mind and it stays there, not just because of knots of skin on his stomach or shoulder. Steve is wounded somehow, but it's below his skin.

The doctor’s hands are less obsessively clinical. They still maintain their air of cool professionalism, but the urgency and meticulousness goes away now that Bucky is getting treatment and his fever is breaking.

Tony signs Bucky’s release from maximum security before his course of treatment has finished. Natasha, Clint, Sam, and Steve all show up to celebrate his good health with balloons and a cake. There’s also a card that each of them signs.  

Maybe things will turn out in Bucky’s favor after all.

 

**Author's Note:**

> we'll get to the part with the summary real soon i just had to add some background, exposition stuff.  
> Thanks for reading, I hope to update at least once a week or once every other week.


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